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0 pointsSomeCallMeTim9y ago0 comments

> I'm not an anti-javascript snob either (I'm not sure what that actually means),

Having been one, and having argued with several, it generally means:

* Looking at how JavaScript started vs. where it is now.

* Complaining about the ways that the backward compatibility requirements of the language can lead to obscure bugs, e.g., auto-coercion on "==" comparisons can end up with surprising and sometimes bug-causing results

and, importantly

* Ignoring all of the best-practice advice to use linters (eslint, tslint) that, in a deterministic manner, prevent you from writing code that contains any of the above bugs.

TypeScript also solves 95% of the major JavaScript complaints.

>There's a lot more in the world than websites and phone apps that need code to run.

and

>I just think it's a bit hyperbolic to call javascript the most important thing happening in software engineering right now when we're solving much bigger global problems than that right now with technology.

If you count all of the code to run apps, servers, and web clients, I think you do hit the majority of code out there, at least if you're counting the number of developers working on it. I think you would hit a majority just with web client side. It seems like everyone and their sister does web development. With all three domains it seems trivial to hit 50%, and I think 80% is still a reasonable estimate. A quick search finds no statistics on this, though. :|

Whether there are "bigger global problems" that are being solved elsewhere isn't really relevant. It's entirely reasonable to say that something is highly important to "software engineering" if it has relevance to more than 50% of software engineers.

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debaserab29y ago

I don't have complaints about javascript. I'm a web developer. I also use React, it's awesome and makes developing a rich user interface much easier. It's not a silver bullet for anything though. Isometric web development is great, but sometimes I think it's more of a solution in search of a problem than an actual problem (it's great that I can render server side, but do I need to? not usually). React native is great, too (if you're smart enough to plan your app ahead of time the right way). Overall though, these are fantastic toolchain improvements that reduce development cycles when used properly. That's all they are though.

I still don't think it's the most important thing to be happening in software engineering. It's a fundamental change in how people use javascript. That's it.

> If you count all of the code to run apps, servers, and web clients, I think you do hit the majority of code out there, at least if you're counting the number of developers working on it. I think you would hit a majority just with web client side. It seems like everyone and their sister does web development. With all three domains it seems trivial to hit 50%, and I think 80% is still a reasonable estimate. A quick search finds no statistics on this, though. :|

Um, not even a little bit. My oven, microwave, and dishwasher all run on code. They have since the 90's. Including my car. I can understand how you could perceive the majority of code written to be for web development as a hacker news reader, but there's a wide world of programming that extends far beyond what your perceiving.

SomeCallMeTimOP9y ago

> My oven, microwave, and dishwasher all run on code.

The quantity of code being written for devices like that is not high, and the quality is almost universally crap. Bad enough that I'm pretty certain 99% is written by a hardware engineer who needed to get the product to work but who had no clue about software engineering.

I've worked with people who write code for cars, and I've done embedded work. One developer can support dozens if not hundreds of products over a career. I still stand by the fact that most software engineers fall into the categories I'm talking about, if only because one software product might require 100-10,000 developers work on it for years, while your microwave probably took one person a month (and an actual software engineer should have been able to write the code in a couple of hours).

I'm not counting by number of devices. I'm counting by number of software engineers. And even if you count the hardware engineers who don't know the first thing about software engineering, I don't think you'd come close.

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